Danielle de St Jorre

Danielle Marie-Madeleine Jorre de St Jorre was born in Victoria in 1941 and became one of the most consequential Seychellois of her generation, though her monument is not a building but a language. She was highly educated abroad, taking a master's degree at the University of Edinburgh and later studying at London and York, and she returned home a trained linguist at the moment her country most needed one.

When Seychelles became independent, Kreol Seselwa was the mother tongue of nearly everyone and the written language of almost no one. It had no agreed spelling, no dictionary, no official standing. De St Jorre set out to change that. She wrote Apprenons la Nouvelle Orthographie in 1978 to teach the new way of writing Kreol, and in 1982 she helped produce the first Creole–French dictionary. This is painstaking, unglamorous work, and it is the reason a Seychellois child today can open a book in her own language at all.

Her vision reached beyond Seychelles. In 1982 she became the first Secretary-General of Bannzil Kreol, the federation of the world's Creole-speaking islands, and she was central to winning recognition of 28 October as International Creole Day and to founding the Festival Kreol, which Seychelles still holds every October. She carried the same conviction into government as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1989, representing her small nation on the world stage while never letting go of the language work.

She died in office in 1997, at just 55. In 2015 a sculpture of her was unveiled at Lenstiti Kreol, the Creole Institute, the second Seychellois so honoured after Antoine Abel. For the diaspora, whose hardest task is keeping Kreol alive in their children far from home, she is the patron of exactly that fight.

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